binners
Full Member
The worst thing about all of this is the fact that hardly anything has been done to rectify this.
The reporter on ITV News at 10 was absolutely scathing in what he said tonight.
Basically that they were poor and had no voice and the powerful took advantage of that.
... and that nothing at all had changed since then.
What I’m seeing in the projects I’m involved in, is the client and consultants pushing the design responsibilities onto the contractor and subcontractors more and more, and just distancing themselves from any decision that could come back and bite them, especially where fire is concerned.
+1 it's definitely having an effect in our line of work & we're the contractors so often get the shitty end of the stick, but it does make it more onerous for the clients when we have to encroach into their precious sq footage to make sure we 100% comply with their interpretation of the regulations.
With so many parties being highlighted as at fault I do wonder if it makes any prosecutions more difficult as the defence will be be its everyone else highlighted in the report not us.
With so many parties being highlighted as at fault I do wonder if it makes any prosecutions more difficult as the defence will be be its everyone else highlighted in the report not us.
This is why it'll take the police years to sort this out. They'll work closely with the CPS to understand the inquiry evidence and how it relates to their ongoing criminal investigation into nineteen organisations and many more individuals
Possible legal considerations for just one possible offence summarised here https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/corporate-manslaughter
Pretty much most public sector staff are in a similar position, and a surprising number have responsibilities that could result in deaths.
The Local Authority Building Control argument to some extent is a red herring. The majority of qualified Building Inspectors now work in the private sector. A significant proportion of the companies they work for were formed either when entire local authority departments jumped ship or were hived off to save money. On the whole these companies do a really good job and are far more aware of their responsibilities than the LA departments they replaced due to flatter management structures which means that the buck stops ar closer to the decision than it used to and due the introduction of specific qualification requirements brought in by the Building Safety Act.
The really scary bit is the BRE and BBA who re supposed to be the arbitors of the safety of products and systems. If a cladding system ot other building product has an Aggrement Certificate and Fire Testing, as long as the design includes all the elements of that system and it is being used in the circumstances described in the certificate Building Control Officers are pretty much powerless to stop its use. These organisations were supposed to be the gold standard which were supposed to give people in the construction industry the confidence that manufacturers' claims about a product had been appropriately verified.
Some of the comments in the report are a bit like asking individual doctors to carry out their own drug testing because NICE can no longer be trusted.
There is blame all round but basically its a result of procurement processes being so heavily weighted on the lowest bid that none of the chains of the process are properly resourced.
We can and should blame politicians for this but its also a societal issue where as long as somethoing is cheap and delivered quickly we don't care if the Kitemark or other safety accreditation is a knock off
Imagine if there was a Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act that the CPS could use to charge those responsible in the companies.
unfortunately Corporate Manslaughter is only for organisations not the individuals who manage them. Pinning manslaughter on “the individual at the top” of an organisation is really difficult.
@Richie_B - thanks for that. That’s a really interesting insight in to how things work in the real world
Presumably other countries took action when the dangers of such cladding were known?
a cladding guy on the radio seemed to say no - even now such cladding is still being installed in *some* countries. Which means the companies who supply it are still selling it, presumably knowing it will be used on high rises?
some countries had tighter building regs / processes anyway but not all, and not all of those regs/processes are robust.
Did the CDM coordinator (now called the Principal Designer) get a mention in the report?
Normally checking that a building system had the appropriate fire testing, Aggrement Certificate, Building Control sign off, and was being installed safely by a competent contractor the majority of those issues would be satisfied. If the BRE and BBA are not to be trusted there is pretty much no way of achieving a significant proportion of the items on that list.
What I’m seeing in the projects I’m involved in, is the client and consultants pushing the design responsibilities onto the contractor and subcontractors more and more, and just distancing themselves from any decision that could come back and bite them, especially where fire is concerned.
Since Grenfell most PI Insurance policies specifically exclude cladding, or pretty much any other element which has a bearing on the Building Safety Act relating to complex buildings. This means that to work within terms of their insurance cover there isn't a huge degree of choice on that.
The fire brigade still seem to be essentially getting criticised for working on the basis that the building and its cladding should be fit for purpose and that all the essential safety features weren’t fictional. It definitely seems like the reason their action plan didn’t work was because of all that systematic dishonesty, deliberate concealment of safety risks, intentional misleading, and incompetent refurbishment and the culture of buck-passing.
no I don’t think the criticism is on stay in place as a fundamental concept, it’s that the chain of command stuck to that for far too long when it should have been quite clear that something was wrong with the major underlying assumption - that the fire would be containable.
further, that this wasn’t the first time they’d encountered this sort of problem - they made little on no change after Lanakal House.
the phase 2 report makes quite a lot of comments on how they dealt with the volume of calls and getting the right information to where it was needed at the scene; even if you didn’t imagine a fire of this scale - surely terrorist attacks have similar potential volume of calls issues. Many of the challenges fire fighters faced on the day were not surprising to those involved, but the organisation seems to have ignored problems like radio coverage, sharing risk information and training because that’s how it has always been done.
No different to, say, turning up at an industrial unit and discovering it’s full of ilelgally stored hazardous chemicals.
And then treating it like it’s an empty shed when clearly it’s much more lively that that - and telling the many neighbours phoning to say materials keep exploding and landing in their garden to keep their windows shut because that’s the script, and not having a system on management that ties together what the control room is hearing, the fire fighters are seeing and saying “oh shit, the rule book might have to go out the window”.
i don’t think anyone is criticising the individual fire fighters, nor the junior officers who first dealt with it by following protocol - its that the organisation never seemed to consider that at some point it would encounter scenarios outside the plan, despite actually having seen them in London and elsewhere; and for knowing their were weaknesses in systems but never having the leadership to address them. Thats pretty damming - but I think you could look at many public sector organisations which we assume are highly professional because the individuals on the ground do their very best in difficult circumstances but the management chain actually have become institutionalised and can’t see the wood for the trees. Cynically some might say that by the time you work through the ranks in these organisations you are actually on a path of least resistance to retirement and your OBE rather than looking to drive institutional change. Probably the selection and promotion criteria bias “safe pair of hand” rather than radical modernisation!
I think you could look at many public sector organisations which we assume are highly professional because the individuals on the ground do their very best in difficult circumstances...
Police and paramedics have their own independent colleges of professional practice that licence aspects of training nationally within a standard curriculum. You can train locally if you're licensed, but without a licence you have to buy training in from a licensed provider
This licensed training also bestows certain legal benefits, e.g. carrying firearms, dog handlers, police drivers, etc.
The fire service doesn't have this. Perhaps firefighters on here have more of an insight into this??
Timba - yes I noticed the creation of a fire service college was a recommendation. Which I thought was odd, because I went to what I thought was the National Fire Service College in Morton on March about 30 years ago - (not for fire service training)…
I got the impression that services in England use it for training senior officers and little else
It also sells training worldwide and is more of a commercial venture
I'm speaking as someone who's only ever used the canteen though, which is why it'd be interesting to hear from a firefighter 🙂
One of the things with organisations like the firebrigade* is the lack of staff "churn" when everyone is effectively promoted from within, they get institutionalised into set methodologies. In most organisations there is staff turnover at all levels, that often means people experienced in other methodologies come into the company and can compare different ways of doing things through experience.
We have the same problem where I work, we get given projects to implement new technology, but the requirements want it to work like old technologies and the organisation is frequently unwilling to change business processes to match the way new technology is meant to be implemented. It is part operational arrogance and a bit of fear of change into the unknown.
Not sure how you deal with that in such an organisation though, I guess international fire service benchmarking and assignments are the only way i can think of.
*I don't have any experience of the fire brigade, but have worked for other government services and the NHS.
Fatty Pickles exemplifies the old-school Tory turd. Not a shouty, ranty arsewipe like Gullis. He always came across as exactly what he's been shown to be here. A lazy, dismissive, bluff, crass 'chum' to big business owners who oiled the wheels of government for a lot (a huge amount) of free lunches.
He thinks he's better than the rest of us. Simple.
I crapped myself when I’d heard about a fire somewhere where I’d serviced a system, was very thankful it worked correctly and no one was hurt, I don’t know how these people live with themselves.
A mate had inspected it, electrically, a couple of months earlier. He had highlighted a large number of faults that needed rectifying, along with recommendations about the fire safety of the building (where the electrical installation could cause a fire etc).
On the night of the fire, he got a call at 5am telling him to turn on his tv to see the news. He was very worried, but, on reading his report again, there was nothing he had said that was wrong, once he had passed on his report, it was up to the Landlords to rectify the failings.
On a similar vein, I was working on 4 blocks of flats 2 years ago. I had my doubts about the safety systems being installed, sprinklers, firemans lifts etc. My fears were found to be true, the Design was totally wrong, and not compliant with Building Regulations (the electrical safety systems should be (electrically) independent of the general installation, these were not, and had no back up supply). I mentioned it to the Site Manager, he coudlnt be less bothered about it, saying if that is what the design says, do it like it says.
Ex Firefighter here, 2 years retired. The Fire service college runs all-sorts of courses, including, as stated above, courses for foreign services.
I did a 5 day junior officers course there which was essentially practical training in running an incident untill more senior managers turned up.
They also train the trainers who go back to their own county training centres, training us in subjects such as Breathing apparatus/live fire or RTC etc, thereby ensuring some standardisation of practice. They also train more senior managers in specialist subjects like chemical incidents, NBC , etc.
So really useful applicable training.
My own experience of Moreton was of excellent teaching staff and incident grounds, but like everything else in the public sector in the last decade or so, suffering from systemic under investment.
I just want to add that we received much value from reports carried out by the FBU into incidents like Shirley towers in Southampton, where lessons were learnt the hardest way. These reports were dissected by our training departments and fed into our training.
Not sure how this worked in London though.I worked for a small county FRS.
I read the full 50 odd page executive summary. So a weak and difficult to understand set of building regulations which failed to capture risks identified as long as 30 years earlier, overseen by fractured regulators who were split across multiple bodies, partially sold into the private sector and seemingly both incompetent, under resourced and in bed with product manufacturers, mixed with ill equipped and under resourced building control bodies who were also partially public and partially privately owned, and a bunch of contractors, designers and clients who didn’t know or understand their role fully, were working to the lowest price possible and passed the buck between each other, then sprinkled with manufacturers who knowingly misled and lied about their products and sold them here because they knew our regulation was weak.
It’s a wonder it doesn’t go wrong far more often frankly.
I mean I know that’s how it is and has been for a long time because I work in the industry, but seeing it written in no uncertain terms is pretty damning. Sadly I don’t think things will change much as long as the industry works on the lowest bidder at every junction and incredibly tight margins and high risk/low investment for too many parts of the supply chain. You can regulate and oversee as much as you like but sadly some companies will still throw their innovation at working around this instead of genuinely improving things.
+1 airvent. Lowest price competitive tendering has a lot to answer for as the root cause.
It’s a wonder it doesn’t go wrong far more often frankly.
Over 4000 buildings in the UK with similar cladding still to be replaced says it does happen a lot. Just thankfully building fires are few and far between.
Back when I was selling insulation in about 2006-2009 this was a know issue in the industry. The people I worked for struggled to persuade people of woodfibre board having reasonable fire performance - heck we used to put it on a vertical stand and be chatting to buyers while holding a blow torch on it for a good few minutes. It just charred but no real flames.
Meanwhile we would then aim the blow torch at the offcut of Celotex of Kingspan and watch them both melt and burn upwards in a melting, acrid smokey mess.
Yet the plastic stuff all had fire certification and we didn't even put ours in for high rise, even though on the continent it is used on higher buildings.
Disturbing statistics.
More than a quarter of firefighters exposed to toxic smoke during the Grenfell Tower fire have had long-term health disorders, a study shows
Firefighters have to be some of the bravest folk around. Run into a burning building? No thanks!
Other folk face dangers in their jobs but firefighters it must be nearly every job!
